Sunday, March 29, 2009

I like to wash my hands before I eat, especially at restaurants. So I give a good scrubbing with soap and water (I like the foam soap the best) and go to dry my hands. A "hand dryer" blowing out hot air with the hope of me being patient enough to wait for it to dry my hands hangs on the wall with some amorphous claim to be more environmentally friendly than paper towels.

Okay, paper towels are most often recycled paper, and even if not, trees are a renewable resource, right?

Air dryers, on the other hand are electric. Here in Florida, electricity is generated by burning coal, a non-renewable resource. Further, most people are like me and are impatient and annoyed by the lack of real drying power, so we end up wiping our hands on our jeans and walking off (defeating the purpose of clean hands). The dryer then continues to blow its preset cycle, raising the temperature and kicking the A/C into overdrive, burning more coal.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

The rest of us could go burn for all they care. As long as "Mom" is around, 100% of Grizzly's and Thunder's devotion is on her. As I type, Thunder is sprawled in her lap as she tries to read, and while Grizzly is beside me, he's staring at her waiting for his turn in her lap.

Hold on that for a moment and move over here where we can discuss "consciousness." What is it? What does it mean to be conscious or sentient? This is a big deal, because on Earth, though there are other intelligent animals, we are the sole possessors of consciousness. In the archives somewhere, you'll recall I mentioned the "consciousness explosion" that perplex scientists so. It seems 65,000 years ago (in their C speed erroneous thinking) our ancestors went from basic animal awareness to consciousness in an anthropological eye-blink. They have no idea how (from an evolutionary standpoint, it's a bad leap; consciousness breaks the chains of "survival of the fittest").

"Consciousness" is "self awareness" with "self direction" and "self gratification" and "self destruction" thrown into the mix. Animals survive. That's their one goal. They can play, but really, everything is geared toward survival. Their instincts drive them that way.

Instead of instinct, we have consciousness, and survival is the simply the springboard on which we achieve our true objective, self gratification. Or as David rightly said in his sermon, self worship. With an animal, it's all about survival; with people, it's all about "me" which often gets in the way of survival. We will kill ourselves in the pursuit of our pleasure.

Now we're back to the dogs and their worship of Lynette. When given a loving object, they worship OUTWARD. This is what Adam and Eve did. They had indwelling sin genetically written in their DNA but it was not expressed until a command not to eat from the tree of "consciousness" activated it. Paul tells us we need the law to show us the sin inside us. One law is apparently enough.

When they ate from it, all other people existed outside the garden also achieved consciousness (Adam is both a name and a word meaning "mankind." Whether or not he was the first man or just the first man created in the garden, he was the Platonic Archetype; what happens to him at a genetic template level happened to everyone - yes, yes, this is all speculation and not explicitly in the Bible... I take it from Paul saying "through Adam, sin (consciousness) entered the world." It could mean, and must also mean, that genetic sin is passed down from the father, not the mother, hence Jesus' sinless nature on Earth.)

From the Fall on, we each worship INWARD. Something about knowing right from wrong makes us dependant on ourselves rather than God.

This was part of God's plan from the beginning (as was our redemption through Jesus). We are to dominate the Earth, which we could not do as animals. Dominate doesn't just mean control, but also to optimize. Conservation, city building with Green principles, art (the real stuff -- maybe grist for another post), music, and all the things that go into "building" (math (ugg), engineering, science) are part of responsible dominion of the Earth. Stewardship is a huge part of dominion. Our takeover of the Indians was dominion at its worst, our rebuilding of cities wiped out by tornado is the good stuff.

There has never been a conscious human being without genetic (indwelling) sin, EXCEPT Jesus.

Jesus was not like Adam, and Adam was not like Jesus. When we enter His kingdom, we will not be like Adam OR Jesus. Unlike Adam, we will be conscious but without sin. Unlike Jesus, we will have an imperishable body. (I'm not really sure what Jesus has now, to be honest. Is He as He was at the transfiguration, or does He have another state of being different than optimized human?)

I can't imagine what that's like. Imperishable, sin-free, still conscious. As long as I'm covered by Jesus, though, I'll find out. :)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

It is so completely backwards to rename a people group because you don't want to refer to their color... even though you're still classifying them by their color.

Think about it; we all know African-American is a *wink-wink-nudge-nudge-he's-black," so what do you call a black person from somewhere else? Or the white guy from South Africa who immigrates here. Is he an African-American?

Native Americans--that throws me, because I was born here. I'm a Native American, by gum! No one calls me an Irish-American or a Scandinavian-American. And let's be honest here, Indians (an unfortunate name to be sure) didn't originate from America. They probably migrated across the Siberian land bridge. Why do we arbitrarily assign them to America? It wasn't even America when they controlled it! Native Pangeans? That would be all of us!

And really, isn't People Group-American racist? Doesn't that mean plain old American refers to a white person? You're still singling out black people as a "different kind of American."

Don't even get me started on Inuit Indians! They drop Eskimo (why? Didn't want to get confused with a pie? Is the Eskimo Pie now a racist dessert?) and they keep INDIAN? I mean, really, did Columbus get them confused with East Indians, too? Did that guy get around or did somebody miss the PC memo...

I think the only group who's got a decent claim are Asians. And maybe Latinos. What color are they, after all? If Asians are yellow, what does that make Latinos? Tea colored? And many black people are, in fact, high yellow which would make them sound loftier than Asians if we stuck to the color theme.

I've got an idea. What if we called all people who are American citizens "Americans" and forget about what color someone is? Either that or go all the way and individualize the color theme. I'd be Fish-Belly White With a Hint of Pink, Josiah would be Edging to Brownish But Maybe Just Almost-Olive, Former Senator Martinez would be Light Brown with Darkish Highlights, and the President would be Toast.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Since I can't follow the math and I'm really just intrigued by the concepts, this is more gentle musing than anything else.

You see, I'm fascinated by what people will believe so they DON'T have to believe in God. Let's move away from evolution and on to cosmology. How did God create the universe? Prevailing theory is a gravity-driven model (which, oddly, takes billions and billions of years). Super-simplified (because that's all I can handle) particles drift together in cosmic clumps with gravity as the principle actor. Clumps become planets and swirling galaxies (similar to water swirling down the drain... the cosmic drains are black holes, great gravity sinks so strong light doesn't escape).

There's only one problem. For galaxies to be moving the way they are, we're missing 90% of the mass required to fuel the gravity theory. So scientists, those wonderful empiricists, have made up dark matter and black holes. Great fields of stuff and pinpoints of hyper-dense mass that HAVE to be there... we just can't see it. Or detect it. Or figure out where it is....

But, see, if gravity didn't do it, how did it happen?

Perhaps... plasma? You see, when streams of plasma (ionized gas) which space if FULL of, cross just right, these straight plasma fibers... spiral. And within those spirals (which look suspiciously like spiral galaxies) they occasionally "pinch," accruing matter rapidly. We know this works with small plasma filaments; it's been proven in laboratories. Many scientists believe it doesn't ramp up to cosmic size, but if it did (and like I said, there is a lot of it in space), those pinches would become planets and suns. Rapidly.

Plasma. Non-scientists who see the ionized gas might call it "light" as in "let there be light."

Saturday, March 07, 2009

...okay, I'll see Star Trek in two months, but really, Blockbuster is a wasteland of things worth seeing, and what's on in the theaters is just as bad. I saw Watchmen last night and regret it. I could go on about that, but why bother? So much stuff that just didn't need to be there. S'okay, that's not what this post is about.

It is a typical worldview these days that there must be no God because people are so evil. The "big joke" in Watchmen (not really a spoiler) is that people are barbarians underneath it all. Civilization is a thin veneer, and because people are such animals, God must be absent, uncaring, or bad Himself.

Ridiculous. The Bible is abundantly clear that men are evil to the core. That's the reason we need God. We were created to be in relationship with Him; it's the only way to stem our wicked hearts. Sure, we can reduce it by making all resources available to all people. Fulfill everyone's wants and you'll never see the horror we'll perpetrate to get what we want. That's the veneer that we of plenty live under.

So, if we need God for salvation, utopia on Earth will actually condemn us for eternity. Anything that drives us into the arms of God is used by Him as good. That puts a spin on movies, not to mention this wicked administration....

Monday, March 02, 2009

Paul Harvey, a unique and cherished voice on the radio, originator of "The Rest of the Story..." passed away this weekend. Nicknamed the "hardest working man in radio," Harvey reported the bad AND the good, and often the funny and just plain weird, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

I believe he may have been a major spur in goading my curiosity into a major trait. One of the first books I ever read was one of his "Rest of the Story" compilations. The stories don't always pass Snopes muster, but it was a strong encouragement to dig beneath headlines and find the people underneath.

His broadcasts have been guest hosted a lot lately, notably by his son and former Gov. Huckabee. When he did speak, the energy was there but the voice was failing.